


A Wine for the Heart

by cinereous



Category: Dragon Age (Video Games), Dragon Age: Inquisition
Genre: Felix Alexius Lives, Friends to Lovers, Love Confessions, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-24
Updated: 2020-07-24
Packaged: 2021-03-05 02:42:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,298
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25316980
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cinereous/pseuds/cinereous
Summary: If Felix was going to live, Dorian was going to make damned sure helived.
Relationships: Felix Alexius/Dorian Pavus
Comments: 6
Kudos: 22
Collections: Little Black Dress Exchange 2020





	A Wine for the Heart

**Author's Note:**

  * For [greygerbil](https://archiveofourown.org/users/greygerbil/gifts).



> Thank you so much to [habenaria_radiata](https://archiveofourown.org/users/habenaria_radiata/profile) who beta read this work for me!

Skyhold was a place like no other. Dorian was familiar with places that were old and full of history. He had attended parties in homes decorated with priceless paintings of old wars, rituals, and famed magisters. He was gifted rare books in languages so archaic it took him months to translate. Dorian had a great appreciation for the past, even if he scorned repeating it. 

But Skyhold was different. It was more. There was magic in each crumbling stone and every vining weed that crawled through their cracks. The room he stayed in yawned with unheard whispers when he was trying to fall asleep, and every fire that crackled in the hearths cast strange shadows that few noticed or cared to put any thought towards.

It was, Dorian decided, the only explanation for why Josephine’s office always felt so hushed. He would never understand how this room held more silence and gravity than the library. Then again, the constant nattering of birds would do that to a place.

He stood in the doorway without hurry, leaning against the frame and watching happy-as-you-please over Felix working studiously at Josephine’s desk.

His oldest and most beloved friend was looking better these days. Even from across the room, Dorian could see that the pale, ashen quality to his skin was almost entirely gone. His more familiar golden coloring bloomed warm under the light from the fire and the sun filtering in through the window. His hair had grown in a bit since his arrival here and his treatment had begun. Felix had explained that he’d kept it shorn because it would grow in brittle and dry, falling out in chunks inside his hood when they traveled. Now it shined, and while still short, Dorian relished every time Felix would scrub his fingers through it in thought, or embarrassment, or shy laughter.

As if reading his mind, Felix lifted a hand and began to do just that, trailing his fingers through the short strands of his hair, trailing and scratching and...Dorian watched with his heartstrings clamoring to see Felix begin massaging at the back of his head, his eyes closing and squinting in discomfort.

The secretive treatments Solas performed on his friend were anyone’s guess. Felix was surprisingly tight lipped about the whole thing, but all anyone else seemed to care about was that it was _working_. Each day the blight seemed to touch Felix less, but Dorian hated not knowing. Hated anything he didn’t understand, really. He hated that it wasn’t immediate, worst of all.

The fire positively roaring in the hearth and throwing the room into a sweltering sauna was proof enough of that. The chills, the headaches, the moments of dizziness, and the coordination issues all remained. Felix was a good sport. He bragged on Solas at every opportunity to anyone who would listen. When he asked Josephine for work he explained that, thanks to Solas, he could once again hold a quill without his hands shaking. With the fog no longer clouding his mind, and the return of his physical faculties, he could offer his talents to the Inquisition -- if she would have him. And she had. Of course she had. The Inquisition was growing in strength and numbers every day, but there were fair few who could actually make sense of those numbers.

But Dorian worried they were pushing him too hard. His father’s captivity in the dungeons directly beneath them was stress enough for a man healing. He’d been accused of being the sort to stick his nose into things that didn’t concern him, but he was right, and no one else seemed to have the time or the conscience to truly listen. Fortunately, he was an absolutely wonderful friend.

“Ah, there you are,” he greeted, finally making his presence known and pushing off from the door frame to begin walking indolently towards the desk. “I feel like I’ve searched the whole castle looking for you.”

Felix looked up from the scroll in front of him, eyes doing a quick and thorough flick of assessment before dropping back down to his equations. Even so, just the sight of his dark eyes still smudged purple from lack of sleep and exhaustion gripped at Dorian’s heart.

“Oh yes. Strange that you found me in the place I most frequently spend my time. Are you sure mage to the Inquisition is your calling, Dorian? You’d make a fine bounty hunter.”

The words should smart, but coming from Felix -- delivered with one of his patented wry smiles -- it felt very much like affection. Normally, his friend was all somber aphorisms and kind words, but it did Dorian so well to hear some of the old, familiar nettle sting settling back into him that had been a staple of their youth.

Dorian slid further into the office, trailing slowly around the chairs by the fire and grazing his fingers along the bookshelves lining the wall until he stood at Felix’s side at the desk. The parchment in front of him was covered in a thousand tiny, cramped numbers and even tinier penned in names. It was all excruciatingly neat and perfect, not a single drop of spilled ink or tea to be seen.

Felix’s mind still astounded him. He had the uncanny ability to do maths in his head quick as lightning, spouting off numbers so large it challenged belief. He was the sort to know exactly how much something would cost to the penny, or how many oranges could fit in a crate. His mind was orderly and calm and brilliant in the same way some gemstones grew in perfect spiraling squares.

And that his mind...his body, his _friend_ was sitting here at all, was the greatest miracle of all. One worth celebrating, in fact.

Dorian grinned, plucking the quill from the other man’s fingers and brushing the feather tip against Felix’s forehead. “I cannot sit idly by and watch you _waste_ away over these ledgers any longer. You are coming with me. Come along.”

Felix tried to argue, tried to find his tongue to tell him that he would not, but Dorian knew him too well. He grabbed him by both of his too thin wrists and began to drag him up to his feet. He shoved and pushed at his lower back and felt heat bloom through his chest when he received little more than overwhelmed laughter in response.

“And where are you taking me? You’re not forcing me to eat again are you?”

“Forcing you? No,” Dorian replied, letting the ‘no’ drag a bit in a way that still expressed some guilt. Felix’s appetite was still meager at best, and eating in the dining hall was loud and overwhelming for him most of the time given the headaches. 

Dorian guided him through the door as if taking him there, but in the tiny chamber just outside of it, he pulled Felix down the stairs to their right. He could hear Felix make a sound of reticence behind him. 

“Er, Dorian...why are we going down there?”

“I have a surprise for you. Consider it an adventure.”

“Poorly lit stairs full of cobwebs at the bottom feel less like an adventure and more like a horror story,” Felix reminded him, but he did still follow. Dorian was surprised to realize that Felix must have been working for Josephine for weeks now without ever going down here. 

Was he inadvertently dragging his friend along somewhere he had actively avoided up until now? It stood to reason that Felix didn’t do much of anything ‘adventurous’ any longer. He had planned his last adventure. It involved slipping secret notes to the Inquisitor and turning the tide for the mages in the brewing war. Dorian was not stupid. He knew it was meant to be his last act of defiance for the greater good before his death...but now he would not die anytime soon. Not if Dorian could at all help it.

Which meant a few more trips down creepy stairs as far as he was concerned. If Felix was going to live, Dorian was going to make damned sure he _lived._

The stairs were steep, and Felix had to keep their hands locked the whole way down lest Felix get a dizzy spell and go tumbling, but eventually they made it safely to the bottom. Dorian could admit some cleaning down here wouldn’t have been a bad idea. He’d made sure all the torches and candles were lit earlier, and so it was much easier to navigate than usual. He’d only been down here once before with the Inquisitor, but he’d gotten permission to borrow the space earlier.

Behind him Felix was quiet, but that was not unusual. Felix tended towards quiet reflection and observation while Dorian enjoyed speaking and flashing. It was part of why they had always been such good friends. Dorian allowed Felix to be introverted while giving an outward appearance of being involved in their social circles, and Felix had offered him a quiet, safe place to be himself without judgment.

Men changed, he knew, but there was something inexplicably comforting about the fact that Felix never had. Both loss and happiness had never been enough to force Felix into being anything but the tender, inquisitive boy he’d met when they were small. 

Dorian also knew that love changed. It grew, it lessened, it became more complex, and it had a way of making him lose his mind and wish for things during dark times where it was foolish to do so.

Up ahead, beneath the large painting mounted on the wall, lay the surprise. Orchestrating it had taken more work than Dorian cared to admit, but after many harassing conversations with Josephine to ‘order’ certain things, and even more colorfully worded arguments with the cooks, he had put together a meal that he knew Felix would appreciate.

He had spread out a blanket on the floor, and on top of it there were all of Felix’s favorites: crunchy baked flatbread with goat cheese and onions cooked until sweet, dark citrus broiled over flame and doused with honey and mint leaves, flakey pastry filled with jam and spices, and a truly beautiful tart covered in nuts and berries. 

The closer they walked, the slower Felix became until he was tugging Dorian back to look at him, his brows knit in an expression of uncertainty. “Is this...for me? Dorian, this is too much.”

“No, no no,” Dorian crooned, offering him a delighted smile even as he began to walk backwards, still tugging him along. “This? This is nothing. This is far too little, in fact. I asked for an entire three tier cake you see, but oh Dorian! We can’t possibly deliver that to you in the mountains in one piece!”

His antics had the desired effect. Felix stopped looking unsure and fell into laughter instead, his shadowed face brightening and growing all the more beautiful in this one moment of unabashed delight. He could even see the flush of color on his cheeks, rosy and youthful even in the dim lighting. All the work he put into this simple picnic was now proven worth it.

“I know food has been hard,” he went on, voice dropping into seriousness easily as he clutched at Felix’s ink stained hands. “But you said your sense of taste is coming back. I wanted to...goad your tongue into more. I thought perhaps I could convince your sense of taste to stick around by a meager sacrifice of fruit tarts. And to share in that food, if I’m honest. Just look at it.”

Felix does, his smile lingering on his lips as he stared and stared and finally looked back. “Dorian, I don’t know what to say. I-...is that-...”

“Valarian peach wine? The kind that I know is your favorite since that disastrous wedding we attended at sixteen? Yes. It took many changing hands to get _my_ hands on it, but I stand by my work,” he explained with a theatrical bow to pick up the bottle and hand it to Felix.

The other man handled it like it was a baby, his hands far too gentle and faintly shaking. So much so, that Dorian reached out to cup the side of his face.

“I’m sorry,” Felix said in embarrassment, his voice clogged with unshed tears that he tried desperately to clear his throat of. “It’s been a bit of an adjustment. Living, that is.” 

He tried to keep his words light and a shade sarcastic, but the damage was already done. Dorian’s heart was already shredding itself to pieces. His hand was still pressed to Felix’s face, and he took some small pleasure in dragging the pad of his thumb through the stubble along his jaw. The soft sandpaper rasp in the tense silence was oddly reassuring, and his lips twitched with a vaguely uncomfortable smile.

“Listen to me. I will not stand here and endure your apologies. They aren’t anymore necessary than they are warranted. I wish to hear you kick and scream at the world or tell me your deep, scholarly nothings...but you may keep your apologies.”

He had learned years ago that dealing with tricky things like emotions was always made easier with a bossy attitude and a little humor, and it was still reassuring every time it worked. He watched Felix’s face fall into lovingly irritated amusement, even if his fingers clenched so tightly at the bottle of wine his knuckles bled white.

That was quite enough of that. 

Dorian guided Felix down to a sit on the blanket, plying him with a plate of everything and filling his glass with fragrant wine. The other man didn’t seem to know what to do beyond smile and eat, occasionally glancing up through his lashes. But he ate. He ate more than Dorian had ever seen him do so since they arrived here. 

He kept conversation going between them about absolutely nothing. He asked after his friendship with Josephine, about who was donating to the Inquisition and in what embarrassing amounts. They talked about the Inquisitor, and the weather, and even a bit about Cullen since Dorian had been playing chess with him in the garden.

It was strange to realize it was the most he had heard Felix talk since they were both still in Tevinter.

Eventually Felix’s hunger waned, as did the conversation, but his mood seemed much improved. Dorian found himself staring, lost in his own thoughts. Felix was so busy staring holes into the painting that he didn’t seem to notice the attention. Dorian watched for what felt like an endless eternity as the man sucked honey from the tip of his thumb and then licked his lips, looking for all the world like a hundred sordid romance stories at once. His mind forced it all into loving slow motion, eyes tracing his dark lips and the flash and shift of his equally dark eyes. He was so distracted that he had to ask Felix to repeat himself when he asked him a question.

“Beg pardon?”

“What is this place exactly?” Felix asked, twisting his body this way and that in order to see more and more of the long room. “It’s filthy. Does no one use it?”

Dorian moved to his feet, offering his hand down with a flourish. “Ah! Good question. This room we’re in currently? Not a fucking clue. However, I think this other room you will like.”

He pulled Felix by the hand, tugging him like he would a lover over into the room nearby, opening the heavy door. The scent of decay rushed to greet them and, behind him, he could hear Felix sneeze adorably as the dust assaulted him.

He had theories on this place. Being attached to the kitchens and a wine cellar made it feel like a dining hall of some sort, but he had still never quite figured out why it was so closed off. Secret dinner parties, he supposed. Ones that needed an ancient library and office just off to the side. It was all very Tevinter in his opinion.

The hallway ahead was even more littered with cobwebs than the larger room, and he noticed Felix stayed very much in the center of the space while staring down each gossamer clump in the corners. It wasn’t the spiders that bothered Dorian so much as the odd lighting this space had. Shades of greens crowded the gold from the candelabras, clinging to the stone like permanent shadows. It reminded him of spirit magic so heavily that he always found himself treading carefully each time he paid this strange room a visit.

At the very end of the hallway the space opened up into a small circular office lined with bookshelves up to the ceiling, one very large tome open on the desk in the center. It was so dramatic that Dorian didn’t doubt that Varric could use it in a book as a meeting space for two assassins.

Felix looked to be in awe of it, slipping by him to look at the large tome, his fingers hovering above the dusty pages without ever touching. His hands had a faint tremor to them, but Dorian could see even from here that his nails looked healthier.

“What language _is_ this? How fascinating.”

“That old thing?” Dorian scoffed, moving forward while plucking a book from the shelf at his side. He sauntered up to him and pressed a hand to the small of his back in greeting. Out of his leathers and scalemail, Felix cut a far more lithe figure, and he was warm beneath the velvet of his shirt. “Here. I think you will find _this_ one even more fascinating.”

Felix turned in an instant. It was almost like magic the way he trusted Dorian and his opinions so implicitly. He took the book from his friend’s hands and opened it to the first page or two. It was like watching a child on their name day. Felix’s eyes went wide with excitement and surprise, already hungrily reading through passages and looking at the diagrams.

“Dorian, do you have any idea what this is?” he whispered, voice so full of awe and childlike glee that it made his insides go disgustingly sweet and thick as honey. When was the last time he had heard Felix so happy? “This kind of mathematics is purely theory. Look, this equation here looks like it could be-”

Everything that poured from Felix’s lips was utter gibberish to Dorian, but still he listened raptly, nodding his head and making appropriate sounds of enthusiasm and fake understanding. He asked questions where he could, but for the most part he simply soaked in the passion that fell from Felix’s entire body like autumn leaves, all brilliant colors and brittle, soft beauty. 

The question echoed through his mind again. When had he last seen Felix so happy? The answer bubbled up from his memories far too easily, one in a small handful he kept clutched close to his heart. It was the very wedding at which they’d acquired their taste for peach wine. Hidden away in the family’s library, the sound of strings and drums soft and far away there among the gilded shelves.

They always seemed to find libraries so easily. Felix would tease him and say he had a nose for the smell of books. Every dull party could be run away from, and there was something particularly fun about drinking wine and searching the shelves for dirty books that may or may not exist. 

He remembered Felix sitting on the arm of the cushy chair he sat on, dressed in his fancier party attire, fabric the color of sunflowers and sunset and a faint ring of kohl around his eyes. Dorian had found himself besotted with a handful of men up until that point, but he could still remember the way his stomach flipped and his fingers faltered, unable to turn the page when Felix lifted the bottle up to drink from it, throat working and lovingly outlined by the light of the candles.

He had given his first kiss to Felix that night gladly, entranced by his shy smiles that hid cloaked daggers and brilliance. It felt so long ago, but in that moment it felt as clear and sharp in his memory as if it had happened only yesterday.

They’d never had a chance to explore what could have been then. His apprenticeship, Felix’s new schooling, travel, politics...death and disease and funerals and betrayal from his father...life kept happening. The one thing Dorian was still certain of now was that he had never stopped caring for him.

“You know that I love you, yes?”

The words left him without pause for thought, and the buzzing silence that swept through the room made Dorian uncomfortably aware that he had said them out loud instead of in his mind as he had for the past few months. Years, if he was honest with himself, which he often was not.

Felix looked stunned and rendered speechless, the book still clutched in his fingers. Dorian was not sure if it was the flicker of the candles, a trick of the light, but he felt as if the green of the stone glowed brighter. Where once such color would have drained Felix and made him look more ill, it now only carved handsome shadows into his face.

The moment dragged so long he was seconds away from talking, filling silence and space with words to distract, diminish, lead far, _far_ away from his humiliation, but before he could Felix broke the quiet instead.

With laughter. Breathless, manic, teary sounding laughter, that seemed too much like it scraped at his throat. But for all that it sounded painful, it also sounded bright and joyful. When he finally stopped to catch his breath his cheeks were flushed with color and his eyes glistened with tears of mirth. He looked _beautiful_. Dorian didn’t know what to _say_. He didn’t know why his confession had led to this, and he wished he had been able to plan it, to give it the bravado and delicacy it deserved.

But then Felix was kissing him.

The taste of peach wine flooded his senses, bright and sweet and tinged deeply with nostalgia. Dorian wasted no time wrapping his arms around his waist, pulling him close and feeling just how thin he was under his robes.

Stubble burned at his cheeks and the fingers against his neck held the faintest hint of a tremor, but oh, his skin was so soft. He smelled like burned wood and elfroot mixed with something even more green and medicinal, but under it all were familiar oils and the tang of lemon he was always adding to his tea. 

It was somehow exactly the same and completely different all at once.

His body moved of its own accord, his boots sliding across dust soft stone, until he found himself pushing Felix gently up against the bookshelves. The splinter of decaying wood and the waxy feel of grimy leather binding dug into the meat of his palm as he steadied himself. He was thoroughly unwilling to break the kiss, not now, not ever, but the decision was made for him.

Felix turned his head to the side with a gasp, breaking the seal of their lips. Dorian was sure he had overstepped, had misread. A cutting little insult was already on the tip of his tongue, ready to unload poison even into the person he cared for the most in the world at the whisper of possible rejection.

Until he realized Felix was clutching at his chest and taking deep, heaving breaths. Like he couldn’t breathe. The venom morphed to apology there in his mouth, but as he began to speak Felix’s hand shot out to cover his lips. His moustache brushed his fingertips, and Dorian’s brows knit in confusion.

Dark eyes shifted up, green and gold reflected there and reminding him of copper coins in the bottom of a murky pond. “Don’t you dare apologize,” he rasped, his voice threadbare and amused and perfect. His dark lips were curled into a smile, and the book of mathematics was clutched protectively to his chest. 

Felix removed his hand from his mouth, dragging his chilly fingertips down Dorian’s neck and coming to rest against his furled collar. 

“I do know that you love me,” he whispered, cocking his head to the side like one of Leliana’s crows. “More than I deserve, to be honest, but I gave you up a long time ago.”

“Gave me up?” Dorian repeated, feeling an obscene amount of outrage bubble up in his chest. “Like giving up cake? I think I’m offended. Did you really think that you could stop me? I am stubbornness personified.”

The other man’s smile was the sort of thing songs were written about, light in the darkness, calm in war, and other such ridiculous cliches. Where once Felix had filled him with bitter tragedy and bitter dread for a future unlived, he now felt overflowing with nothing but honey sweet nothings.

Felix took his hand, tugging at it and walking slowly backwards in the direction towards their picnic in the next room. Corypheus, rifts, Gereon, templars, alliances...everything faded down to a pleasant nothing. All that was left was the man who had stolen him treats as a boy and his breath as a teenager. There was only one thing left.

“I know,” Felix said, the same seriousness to his tone when he’d warned Dorian that there were things worse than dying. “Thank you for not giving up on me.”


End file.
